My own calendar

Five-tracks! (Photo by BobbaLew.)

—“Of all the railroad mainlines I’ve been to,” my brother says; “I’ve never seen one with five tracks.”
The February 2018 entry in my calendar is an eastbound Norfolk Southern freight at a location my brother and I call “five tracks.”
It’s from the bridge PA highway 53 uses to cross the old Pennsy main toward Allegheny Mountain. It’s not actually a five-track main. The tracks right-to-left are Four, Three, Two, One, and Main-Eight. Main-Eight, barely visible, is a storage siding. Often heavy coal trains are stored on Main-Eight before being dragged over the summit.
But it is four-track main. Usually mains are one or two tracks. Union Pacific’s heavily traveled main across NB is I think only two tracks, although it may now be three. Burlington-Northern Santa Fe into Los Angeles is now three tracks, if you include Santa Fe’s original 3% grade down from Cajon Pass. It used to be two tracks, and the second was to bypass that 3% grade. The third track was recently added next to that second track.
South to FL from Washington DC is mostly two-track, but often only one track across bridges.
Tracks Four and Three are on the original Pennsy grade aimed at the original Pennsy tunnel in Gallitzin. Track Four is westbound only; Track Three can be either direction.
Tracks Two and One (and Main-Eight) are on New Portage Railroad’s alignment, and aim at New Portage Tunnel. New Portage Railroad was built long ago to bypass the original Portage Railroad with its inclined-planes.
That Portage Railroad was part of PA’s response to the hugely successful Erie Canal. Allegheny Mountain couldn’t be canaled, so PA built a combined canal/portage railroad that eventually went bust. Transloading canal packets for portage was cumbersome and slow. By then railroad technology was surpassing canals.
When PA abandoned its canal/portage railroad, Pennsy got it for peanuts. It gave them a second summit tunnel atop Allegheny Mountain. That tunnel was slightly higher than their original summit tunnel, but they could ramp to it. That ramp is known as “The Slide,” and was originally 2.36%.
The Slide was reduced to 2.28% when both tunnels were enlarged in 1995 to clear doublestacks. Pennsy’s original tunnel was also switched back to two tracks. It was two tracks at first, then reduced to one track as railroad equipment got bigger.
(Pennsy opened a third tunnel in Gallitzin in 1904, next to its original tunnel. But it was abandoned in 1995 when the original tunnel was enlarged.)
So this NS freight is eastbound on Three, and will start down the east slope toward Altoona through the original Pennsy tunnel.
I have no idea what train this is, although it looks like trailer-vans in well-cars, plus trailer-on-flatcar. Maybe also double stacked trailer-containers toward the rear, also in well-cars.
This picture is before my brother became savvy about train-numbers of every train. We probably heard this train clear “MO” on our railroad-radio scanners, after which we jumped out of my brother’s car and ran to our photo locations on the bridge.
“MO” are the telegraph call-letters of a railroad-tower once there. “MO” once was, and still is, the location of interlocked switches and crossovers. It’s also where the main goes from three to four tracks, plus the origination of branches once Pennsy but now Corman.
Helper SD40Es and the SD80MACs are maintained in a facility in nearby Cresson.